Quote of the Day: British Energy Expert Blasts Gizmo Green Design

Green Gizmos on London's "Green" Strata Tower
Stephen Del Percio discusses a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald , where British energy and building expert Roderic Bunn of Building Services Research and Information Association criticizes the Gizmo Green approach to green building:
We have been seduced by the often false promises of new technologies. A building can be mounted with wind turbines and photovoltaics, but they don't contribute nearly as much as designers think they do because they haven't driven down the energy requirement to begin with. We tend to glue these things on to the outside of buildings before we actually have reduced the loads of the building as far as we can go. The mantra should be 'half the loads, double the efficiencies. Halve the carbon in the fuel supply before we go anywhere near on-site renewables. They are often expensive, small, very complex, and maintenance hungry, and the maintainability of these things is rarely taken into account. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger